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THE CROSSING Marissa Roth

Essays by Pico Iyer

THE CROSSING Marissa Roth Essays by Pico Iyer

Lecturis

Foreword

THE OCEANS INSIDE OF US Pico Iyer

without—even as a greater ocean separates the fortunate few who can travel by choice from the undefended many who have to take to innertubes, leaky vessels and life-rafts through terrible necessity.

To the wide-awake eye, a universe churns and shines inside every still life. And to the truly attentive artist, there are no still lives, since there’s vibrancy and movement in everything we observe; that’s part of what moves and vitalizes us. It’s easy to deliver such sentences, but when I look at Marissa Roth’s achingly soulful images from her crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, I’m reminded how every moment is an epiphany for those who know how to watch.

For decades now Marissa has had the gift of lighting up places of deepest importance to me, from the Philippines (which tears at my heart as few places do) to the Southern California where we both spend time (and which in places seems to suffer more from affluence than its absence). Her work has been almost uncannily versatile, whether moving from her black-and-white portraits of Hollywood to the Rothko-worthy shades of the ocean.

I’ve always loved the sea, because it represents such a field of reflection, often so still even as it’s constantly in motion. I took a three-week trip around the Cape of Good Hope when I was in my mother’s womb traveling from her birthplace (India) to mine (Great Britain), and after my mother, then widowed, reached the age of seventy-seven, I started taking her on long sea voyages, up and down the coast of Alaska, across the Mediterranean and the Baltic, around the Caribbean. At sea we could count all the ways we’d changed since our maiden voyage together—when I was nestled within my mother’s inner ocean—and all the ways we hadn’t.

Yet underlying it all, I always feel the same questions—arising, I’m sure, from the crossings in her own life: the sea in these images steadies us as an object of contemplation, and yet it speaks for the moods, the images that ever keep shifting within us. It asks us where our home is, where we most truly belong, what is real and what imagined.

But as I make my way with reverent slowness through Marissa’s images of that realm of infinite colors, I think of her earlier book, Infinite Light: A Photographic Meditation on Tibet, which somehow compressed the rich and rainbowed teaching of Tibetan Buddhism into a series of piercing, almost abstract canvases. I think of her decades-long work with women who’ve endured war, uprooted and forced to crisscross the world, when all they want is to be still at home. And I think of the crossings all of us are making, at a time when so many live in motion and work to bring the oceans within us in tune with the ones

In the end, all of Marissa’s work carries us back to two things: those emotions that keep moving with the tides and a near-universal longing for stillness, an anchor within. As I lose myself in these transporting images, I wonder how any of us, inwardly and across the globe, can begin to make the deepest crossing of all, from turmoil into peace.

--Nara, Japan